Chronicles Of Depression 2.0: #455: China 3

Rising unemployment and the economic slowdown could cause massive social turmoil in China, a leading scholar in the Communist Party has said.

“The redistribution of wealth through theft and robbery could dramatically increase and menaces to social stability will grow,” Zhou Tianyong, a researcher at the Central Party School in Beijing, wrote in the China Economic Times.

“This is extremely likely to create a reactive situation of mass-scale social turmoil,” he wrote.

Emphasis added by me.

Imagine being a Chinese peasant barely surviving by planting rice.

You’re enticed to get a job in a nearby factory. Suddenly, you no longer live in your old, drafty, rotting home. You live in a shiny company barracks. The pay is shit, but it beats bending over and ripping stalks of rice out of a lake of ankle-deep mud. And you can actually dream of a future.

Then those fucking Americans and Europeans cheat the shit out of the world and your factory closes down because those goddammed Americans and Europeans have plunged millions of your buyers into economic distress.

You’re kicked out of your company barracks and have nothing to look forward to. You can’t do that rice shit ever again. Someone has taken over that patch. And there’s no safety net of Unemployment Insurance in China. Besides, you saw a future. You want it back.

Damn right China is going to have unrest.

The questions are:

1) What lessons will the current Chinese leaders learn from it?

2) Will the unrest grow large enough to topple the current Communists?